Swirlds, CULedger collaborate on distributed applications to CUs

October 30, 2017

Swirlds, creators of the hashgraph distributed consensus platform, and CULedger, a credit union consortium supported by the efforts of CUNA and the Mountain West Credit Union Association (MWCUA), announced an agreement Friday whereby CULedger will use Swirlds’ hashgraph technology as a key component of CULedger’s permissioned, distributed, shared ledger platform for credit unions.

CULedger and Swirlds are making it simple for application developers to build distributed applications that can be used by any number of credit unions. Swirlds hashgraph provides the shared storage (distributed ledger) for these applications, reducing the opportunity for errors, improving efficiency, and ensuring a consistent view of data by all parties.

“After evaluation of numerous distributed ledger technologies, it quickly became clear to us that Swirlds delivers both the performance and banking grade security that our members will demand of shared applications and data stores,” said Rick Cranston, VP of Innovation for MWCUA, and member of the CULedger steering committee. “Our members are interested in building numerous distributed ledger applications to drive revenue, improve member service, and reduce fraud. Swirlds hashgraph will enable them to build and leverage distributed applications, while feeling highly confident of the security and capacity of these applications.”

Swirlds hashgraph provides unparalleled performance compared to alternative platforms that can only process thousands of transactions per second. The hashgraph can process 100,000's of transactions per second, making it possible for CULedger to directly address a much broader set of use cases.

Swirlds hashgraph is the only platform that meets the requirements for fully distributed trust in a distributed ledger and provides the highest level of security in the market by achieving all four of the criteria for banking-grade security, including:

Immutability of Transaction History - No single party can change the order of the transactions applied to the ledger.

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) Resilience - No single party can disrupt the flow of transactions throughout the ledger, making it DDoS resilient. Competing platforms are highly susceptible to DDoS attacks. Using competing platforms, if even a single member of the network is compromised or malicious, then the attacker can direct a DDoS attack against a single computer that disrupts the flow of transactions for the entire network. This is not possible with hashgraph.

Fair Access - No single party can prevent the flow of transactions into the ledger. Competing platforms put the power of which transactions are accepted into the hands of a single party.

Fair Ordering - No single party can influence the order of transactions that the network ultimately agrees on. Competing platforms put the power of transaction order into the hands of a single party. With hashgraph, timestamps on transactions are determined by the community as a whole, not a single leader.

“CULedger is an incredibly innovative project, which is helping to lay the foundation for the future of credit unions,” said Mance Harmon, Swirlds founder and CEO. “We are extremely pleased to be partnering with them to help credit unions remain competitive, aggressive, and serve the needs of their members more efficiently.”

The patented hashgraph consensus algorithm, developed by Swirlds Co-Founder and CTO Leemon Baird, uses an entirely new protocol to enable distributed and decentralized communities to reach consensus in a fast and secure way.

The hashgraph algorithm is resilient to DDoS attacks and ensures mathematically proven fairness in the absolute ordering of transactions.

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